The biggest problem now is blockchain downloading and storing. It takes almost 3GB now and how big will it be in a year? 10G ?
And they have no plan AFAIK to fix that problem...
So I think that if official client is to be kept for advanced users and average joes should find another solution with all protections or hosted.
+1. Danloadin the friggin 1GB+ monetary base all the time seems overkill even to me. How about adding the option to use on-the-fly some online version of the blockchain (via p2p ideally, or some cloud) and/or download a shortened version, like Electrum / Multibit do?
And how about a portable version which stores the wallet and everything in the same folder of the prog instead of hiding it in the system partition? I had to hack a .bat file myself to have a so essential feature.
theres a option for bitcoin.conf that lets you choose any folder youd like
-datadir=Specify data directory